Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language” was an assault on “ready-made phrases,” those clichés and dead metaphors that spring so readily to the writer’s mind, sparing him (and his readers) the trouble of thinking. But it occurs to me that in addition to the phrases at large in the written culture of the society, […]

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About a week after 9/11, I was walking around Greenwich Village with my then-girlfriend (an anarcho-capitalist, no less!) talking about, well, the only thing there was to talk about. She fell silent for a moment, then sort of tentatively offered: “I think I wish Clinton were still president.” I whipped my head around, prepared to […]

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Put me in Kevin Drum’s camp on the much-decried ABC News report of a covert American program to “destabilize” Iran’s government: It reeks to high heaven of a deliberate administration plant. ABC insists it gave the White House and CIA a chance to object to the story if reporting it would endanger operatives in the […]

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They’re finally turning Neuromancer into a film and all I can summon is a sort of dull horror—a feeling not unlike a television tuned to a dead channel (back before that meant serene blue). J. Random Hack Jr. is slated to direct. Hope springs eternal, though: Gibson himself won’t buy that it’s happening until he […]

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If you happen to be planning to head off to the beach for the weekend, perhaps with a freshly repaired iPod, pop by Librivox and pick up a few free audiobooks, recorded from public domain texts by volunteers. It never hurts to run through On Liberty again. Be warned, however, that the guy who records […]

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HT: Boing Boing. I’m a little impressed that this sort of thing was being aired on broadcast television almost 40 years ago.

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Like many other anti-war types, I’ve joined the lament about the apparent lack of accountability for pundits who got it grievously wrong about Iraq. The familiar form of this complaint is that one ought generally to replace people who’ve been demonstrably poor at something with people who seem to be better at it. And that, […]

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At the risk of belaboring what one would hope is an elementary distinction, it’s worth saying something about the connotations of saying someone has “invited,” say, a terrorist attack. John Tabin thinks defenders of Ron Paul are contradicting themselves: Larison seems to think that saying that American policies invited 9/11 is somehow different from saying […]

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Tonight’s Colbert Report featured reporter Bob Deans talking about his new book The River Where America Began. Deans was talking about the early emergence of a sort of proto-democracy in colonial Jamestown, with the caveat that it’s not “democracy as we would recognize it,” since (among other things) “there was martial law, there was torture.” […]

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I can’t say I much regret having missed this AEI event on “Darwinism and Conservatism.” According to The Weekly Standard‘s account, the panelists grappled with such “knotty questions” as: Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe? Maybe I’m betraying my roots in an analytic department, but I’m pretty confident […]

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